February 9, 2010

Our first exercise was the design of a Mobile Museum in the spirit of Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum (as an aside, Ban is currently teaching an options studio at the GSD focusing on temporary structures for disaster relief).

The Mobile Museum is conceived as a temporary, prefabricated and flexible exhibition space for art. We were asked to iterate a single design theme through several variations, using only manual model making methods to prototype design ideas.

My design process focused on a the development of a deployable and flexible structural system for the exhibition space. The exhibition space is conceived as a reconfigurable open hall, populated by mobile pavilions capable of absorbing program that requires additional enclosure or spatial definition. Towards the end of the exercise I studied several variations of a triangulated grid-shell type structure based on Yoshimura buckling patterns and origami folding techniques.